Plastic surgeon Sammy Jo Sliwin will soon learn whether he will recover the medical licence he lost after performing breast and other cosmetic surgeries on his mistress.

Justice Edward Then is expected to rule soon on Sliwin’s Charter challenge over the mandatory revocation of any doctor having sexual with his patient. Ontario doctors automatically lose their licences for having sexual relations with patients.

Sliwin, now 61, had his licence revoked on April 1, 2015, as the College of Physicians and Surgeons discipline committee ruled he had an ongoing sexual relationship with a woman over several years while performing various cosmetic surgeries on her.

Sliwin remains in practice to this day as a judge stayed the revocation a week later.

Justice Edward Then heard the doctor’s constitutional challenge in June 2016. If Sliwin loses his appeal, the revocation resumes.

Sliwin’s prominent lawyer Marie Henein is asserting that the mandatory revocations are unconstitutional. Even if they aren’t, she asserts that “the mandatory revocation doesn’t apply to the allegations” of Sliwin’s former mistress.

Her identity is covered by a publication ban.

“The woman and Dr. Sliwin was, at first, a personal and employment relationship, and secondarily, an intimate relationship, such that her limited treatment by Dr. Sliwin was at all times incidental to either or both of those relationships,” Henein stated in her court document.

The 55-year-old woman testified at a college discipline committee hearing that she and Sliwin had sex for the first time in his clinic on March 8, 2001 while she was working as his office manager.

A few days later, she asked Sliwin, a skilled plastic surgeon, to perform a breast job for free.

The on-again, off-again affair, which started with months of flirting, took place from 2001 to 2007 while he performed multiple procedures, including a face-lift.

She quit her job in 2005 when Sliwin refused to leave his marriage. Their personal relationship crumbled in 2008, court heard.